Snooker - perhaps the most
dignified and gentlemanly of all sports - has long been
associated with images of waistcoats and smoke filled drawing
rooms.

Invented by the Chinese several thousand years ago -
probably - Snoo-a-Kah, as it was then known, was one of
the most highly disciplined of all martial arts. It was
originally brought to the west by someone who hung out with Marco
Polo, and eventually evolved into a game requiring players to
knock little coloured balls down holes in a table.

"Impeccable sportsmanship..."

Nevertheless, some of the
traditions of honour and self-discipline still remain. Modern
snooker players may have exchanged their kimonos and black belts
for waistcoats and bow ties, but they are still expected to
compete in a spirit of impeccable sportsmanship. Or at least,
this is the case as far as the professional game is concerned.

Away from the fame and the big money prizes of the major
championships, hidden away in the back streets and deserted
warehouses of northern England, unlicensed 'bare-knuckle
snooker' - the bastard cousin of its more reputable relation
- is rapidly growing in influence.

Free of the restraints and
controls that regulate professional snooker, the bare-knuckle
variety is an often brutal and vicious game, in which the
emphasis is not so much on potting balls, as on reducing your
opponent to an unrecognisable mass of flesh and bone. The cue,
the balls, sometimes even the table itself can become lethal
weapons in the hands of a skilled player. And it's not
unusual - indeed, it is rapidly becoming customary - for the
spectators to join in.

Several recent bouts have
escalated into full scale riots, and police now recognise that it
is a real problem. The Home Office recently announced a new
initiative to crack down on instances of snooker related
violence. Local police forces have spearheaded the campaign by
announcing an amnesty, in which the general public have been
encouraged to turn in cues, rests and other snooker weapons.

Sergeant Gerald Pimple, of the Manchester Serious Sports Squad,
told us a little more about the new campaign.

"One of the biggest threats to law and order since badminton..."

"There's no doubt that
bare-knuckle snooker is gaining in influence, especially amongst
impressionable youngsters. In inner city areas, it already
accounts for ten percent of violent crimes, and by this time next
year it could rank alongside all-in darts, unarmed scuba diving
and kamikaze table tennis as one of the biggest threats to law
and order since badminton."

So why is it that so many
youngsters are drawn to the illegal snooker joints of Great
Britain? Sergeant Pimple has his own theories on this matter.

"I think it's the
trousers," he claims.

"You look at any snooker
player's trousers and you'll see exactly what I mean -
always neatly pressed, elegantly tapered, and there's plenty
of room to manoeuvre when they are reaching for those difficult
shots. Oh yes, trousers like that could easily turn a young
man's head."

Perhaps the most perplexing aspect
of bare-knuckle snooker is that it is a sport in which everyone
loses. There are no winners, only casualties.

Jack Draylon, a
retired shipyard worker from Leeds, has been officiating at
illegal snooker fights for over fifty years - a remarkable record
for a man still in his thirties. We asked him if he could explain
the basic rules of the game?

"Long pointy sticks..."

"There are several different
schools of thought when it comes to bare-knuckle snooker,"
he told us. "Some of the finer points are really quite
obscure. Basically, though, the idea is that two men gather
around a snooker table with long pointy sticks, and attempt to
beat the living shit out of each other."

In the case of such a violent and
unpredictable sport, it is difficult to enforce any sort of
order. Throughout his career, Draylon was forced to develop his
own particular refereeing style.

"What I do is, I blow a
whistle and then get out of the way pretty sharpish," he
told us candidly. "You don't really want to be too
close when the aggro' starts. Preferably, you want to be in
another room.

" Remember, these are hard men. If they tear your leg
off and stuff it up your back passage, then that's just their way
of saying hello."

Hard men indeed. One such man, who
has both dealt and received his fair share of disfiguring
injuries, is Dennis 'Whopper' Boff. Now, after twenty
years in the top ranks of bare-knuckle snooker players, Boff has
decided that he has had enough.

"It's time to hang up my cue..."

"I've seen too much violence,
suffered too many broken bones," he told us at his four
bedroom bungalow in Essex. "It's time to hang up my cue
and retire. If I want to surround myself with horrifying scenes
of mutilation and despair, I may as well stay at home with the
wife."

These days Boff is content to
spend his evenings watching television, or sticking sharp needles
into Muffin, his pet Airedale Terrier. But there was a time when
he was a vicious, sadistic thug, and a regular contestant at
illegal snooker brawls.

"I was young when I
started," he explains. "Like most kids of my age I was
drawn to snooker by the glamour of it - the smell of the chalk,
the feel of the baize, the fame, the groupies, the trousers.

"Of
course, real snooker is very different to the sort you get on the
telly. Many of us didn't know what we were letting ourselves in
for. You had to be ruthless, merciless - most of the lads didn't
make it. I've seen many a promising young hopeful taken out in
the prime of life by a cue through the chest, or a well aimed
ball to the head."

"I still go weak at the knees..."

But Boff's hunger for success gave
him the strength to struggle through. "I saw people like
Steve Davis and Ray Reardon and I thought, yeah, someday I'm
gonna be just like that. Those guys were our heroes. I still go
weak at the knees whenever I see Jimmy White sink a green."

For 'Whopper' Boff,
those days are now over, although he will never be able to shake
off his reputation as a snooker hard man. He claims to have
turned over a new leaf, and yet he still brags about how people
would steer well clear of him as he walked the streets of his
home town, with his chalk on open display.

"Whopper will never really
turn his back on bare-knuckle snooker," claims Sergeant
Pimple. "He's done too well out of it. Trouble is, the
youngsters coming up now see people like him as heroes."

So are we on the verge of a
snooker epidemic, or can something be done to reverse this
disturbing trend? It has been suggested recently that snooker
licences be introduced, making it illegal for any unauthorised
person to be in possession of a cue in excess of three feet in
length.

Such a move would be unpopular with legitimate snooker
players, and is bound to meet with opposition. Sergeant Pimple
believes that tougher sentencing is the only answer.

"At the moment, the harshest
sentence that a bare-knuckle snooker player can receive is a
fortnight's community service. Well, that's no
deterrent, is it? Two weeks digging some old biddy's front
garden is hardly going to deter your hardened snooker bandit.

"These are rough men, and they must be treated rough. Extreme
violence - that's the only answer.

"The guy just shrugged it off..."

"Look at how they treat
their bare-knuckle snooker players in Sweden. I read about one
man - they spent over an hour beating him savagely around the
head with a cricket bat. The guy just shrugged it off. So next,
they pumped thirty rounds of machine-gun fire into his chest, at
point blank range. He just laughed! In the end they stapled his
lips together, set fire to him and dropped him ten thousand feet
from a hot air balloon.

"That shut him up. Now, we should
have something like that."

Sergeant Gerald
Pimple of the Manchester Serious Sports Squad would like to make
it clear that he is not and never has been a member of the
British Caravan Association. His new album, 'Wot's All This Then:
A Selection Of Songs For Young Lovers' will be out next month,
and a video: 'Gerald Pimple - The Vegas Years' is already
available from most good stockists. We would like to take this
opportunity to thank Sergeant Pimple for his help in compiling
this article, and to wish him every success for his six month
tour of South America.